


On Appropriation

by yourlibrarian



Category: Younger (TV)
Genre: Episode: s04e05 The Gift of the Maggie, Gen, Nonfiction, Reviews
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-17
Updated: 2020-11-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:48:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27597784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yourlibrarian/pseuds/yourlibrarian
Summary: My friend was amused when I described Younger as "milk and cookies." It's a show that has a fairly simple setup with a central secret (the lead character Liza is 15 years older than she pretends to be), and an ongoing set of characters with no major dramas in their lives. It has neither particularly good nor particularly bad writing, but set in the NYC publishing industry as it is, I daresay it has very little resemblance to the reality.  So while I wasn't all that engaged with it, it was one of those shows that's easy to watch if one is doing other things.That is until S4 Ep5, "The Gift of the Maggie." In short, this episode was all about appropriation and the view of fans was pretty infuriating.
Kudos: 2
Collections: March Meta Matters Challenge





	On Appropriation

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted August 25, 2018

During the past month on a rec from a friend I have been watching Younger. It's currently airing reruns daily along with its 5th season weekly. I started seeing episodes during S3 and am now in S4.

My friend was amused when I described Younger as "milk and cookies." It's a show that has a fairly simple setup with a central secret (the lead character Liza is 15 years older than she pretends to be), and an ongoing set of characters with no major dramas in their lives. It has neither particularly good nor particularly bad writing, but set in the NYC publishing industry as it is, I daresay it has very little resemblance to the reality. So while I wasn't all that engaged with it, it was one of those shows that's easy to watch if one is doing other things. 

That is until S4 Ep5, "The Gift of the Maggie." In short, this episode was all about appropriation and the view of fans was pretty infuriating.

The publishing house, Empirical, had long been sustained by a prolific romance author who wore bold pink everything and who died in the previous episode. There is one line of lip service about how she never got any respect for writing romance. They do this while simultaneously bashing their George R R Martin stand-in (who had been their best selling author since the heyday of the romance queen) for writing stories of incest and dragons. 

There was already a rather awful storyline in the previous season in which the Martin character decides to write erotica under a pseudonym. He is portrayed as physically repulsive (he is overweight and uses a mobility device) and his erotica as absurd and overdone. But Empirical buys the book once they find out his identity because they can't risk him getting involved with another publishing house, especially since his fantasy series isn't yet complete. The POV of the show was clearly that all his writing was crap and they had no respect for him or his genre, but he was a best selling author so what can you do?

During this episode, the lead character, Liza (who has to have the term HEA, happily ever after, explained to her as an element of the romance genre) meets with an agent to bring in fanfiction writers and says she wants to find the next E.L. James. The agent suggests she read the website Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, though I wasn't clear if this was because Liza knows nothing about romance and its many genres, or because the agent was implying that fanfiction authors could be found through it. I suspect the latter because, seriously, she works in publishing and can't just consult her own in-house writer guidelines and back catalog to learn more about Romance titles?

**Who's Appropriating Who?**

That scene was already simultaneously interesting and annoying. But in this episode the theme is "appropriation", which gets expressed in three different ways.

a) Imprint head Kelsey, who has long been a fan of a spy thriller author, approaches him at the romance queen's funeral and plans to bring him over to her imprint. She plans to do this while going on a date with him. She is later warned off by the thriller author's editor, who she also ends up dating. She succeeds in luring the author away from the other company, although later the other editor suggests they were going to drop him anyway. Kelsey's pitch to the author revolves around creating a market among female readers for his work, and he says he's fine with pink covers. She suggests that he create a female protagonist who is just the same as his male protagonists and there won't be any difficulty in getting female readers.

b) A young woman who is working as a barista wants to be an artist. She meets one of the regular characters, Maggie, who is an artist, and offers to be her intern for a while. When she says she needs to quit interning, Maggie can't pay her, so she instead offers one of her paintings in compensation.

A friend of Maggie's, Josh, is dating the intern, and discovers that not only is she wealthy, but her art consists of painting additions to the original works of other artists. She is going to be doing a show of her own with these pieces. The intern's mother explains that her daughter started off with some works from their own collection, but her parents are now only involved to handle any lawsuits that arise. The young woman has done the interning trick with a number of people and has been given their art in payment. She explains to Josh:

"It's not like Ray Charles was mad at Kanye for sampling his music. It's our generation's role to build on the work that came before us. If Maggie's a true artist she'll understand."

Josh alerts Maggie that her painting will be used this way and says offhandedly "She has this whole philosophy about it" but he didn't feel it was right. Maggie and Liza go to the show, and Maggie is upset because her intern is selling her own repurposed painting for $20k when Maggie complains she only makes $5k for her work. The intern's mother hopes Maggie has attended to thank her for making her relevant again. The intern explains that she has been given Maggie's work, put her own mark on it, and now it's hers, that's what her whole show is about. Maggie takes a switchblade, cuts through her canvas, and states that she has now taken it back.

c) Empirical plans to have ghostwriters continue the work of their romance queen after her death because it was in her contract that this could be done.

It's during their search for potential ghostwriters that things get particularly unpleasant, as we get a montage of women providing ideas for what sorts of stories they would write, and portrayed as creepy. If you guessed that their ideas are also fanfiction tropes, you'd be right.

Then they meet the person they eventually hire. She's a lit professor at Columbia but wants to keep her romance writing hidden because she couldn't get tenure otherwise. (Fun fact: tenured romance writers exist!) She's going to do it because she has 4 kids in college, but her idea is to explode the genre by not always giving her stories a HEA and exploring how people hurt one another in relationships. The genre as it exists is too predictable. "My stories would be about real love" she says.

After the interviews Liza and her boss discuss her hiring. He wonders if readers won't be disappointed. Liza says the ideas may not be as commercial but they're more interesting, plus readers might feel better to know they're not crazy if their own romances don't turn out like in Romance books.

**How Does the Show Spin This?**

Unpacking all this, the episode deals with professional appropriation but its hardest hits are against those trying to break into the business.

a) What Kelsey does is underhanded, though her actions are downplayed in the episode because the competing editor doesn't end up caring much about her acquisition of his author. Her approach to marketing to women also comes off well.

b) The art intern, who exists in this episode only, comes off the worst because of both her underhanded manner of acquiring artwork and the suggestion that she has no talent of her own, but is simply scrawling over actual art. There have been [various lawsuits](https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=35f8ee58-6673-4b45-9192-f99924b4da08) about just this issue (which the original artists have lost), but Younger's POV is clear, given that she is deceptive in almost all her actions. Plus Josh dismisses her explanation for her actions. But most important is the fact that she is better off financially than Maggie, and it's suggested her parents are indulging her behavior, meaning that she's presented as punching down and not up.

c) The fact that Empirical is essentially creating fanfiction due to contractual opportunism is not much questioned. One suspects this is largely because the show doesn't have any respect for the Romance genre but stops short of bashing it. No doubt this is because Younger itself is a show for women that traffics heavily in relationships. (One could call it the TV equivalent of chick lit). When someone poses an objection to the ghostwriting, they're told that Tom Clancy's death has not stopped his books from continuing. Genre books in general are not well regarded in this show, despite the fact that they're what make the publishing business run.

The women in the interview montage are portrayed unfavorably, not just in what they say but in how they appear (and this series is very looks oriented). For example one interviewee, a young pierced Asian woman, is suggested to be a goth. The lit professor by comparison, is a tidily dressed middle aged white woman. 

The professor's argument is a recurring one which generally makes most Romance readers incensed. Her story ideas do not fit the genre. Romances have a HEA because that's what readers are reading for. If they wanted misery they could just look around them. They want to see how people get the gold ring and happiness even in the most unlikely of circumstances. No one goes to watch a Disney movie because the Princess dies and Prince Charming secretly has two other families. (Or, as someone who read my review suggested, "Maybe next they can have someone come in and reinvent historical novels by instead having them take place in the future, on space ships. Wouldn't that be a fresh take.") So what the lit professor wants to write is simply literature. 

Liza later says as much to her boss – clearly anything "commercial" is bad. In a separate storyline, Liza and Kelsey publish a book that is about life philosophy as expressed by a dog. Everyone treats it as an embarrassment even though the book becomes a big success. (My first thought when it was pitched was that it would do quite well in the marketplace, being fun and light hearted). 

What seemed most ridiculous to me was the professor saying "My stories would be about real love." To me that was the equivalent of saying "My stories would be about real dragons." That's not why people are reading it and if it's what you want to write, don't pretend it's a Romance. 

**Look Closer to Home**

This episode was a particularly blatant example of what I find wrong with the show. I find its theme self-referential, since I strongly suspect that a show targeted to middle aged women could not be greenlit for the same reason that the imprint Millennial exists on Younger -– it acknowledges a need to appeal to a younger audience.

So while the show is ostensibly about representing the younger generation, in fact it is about the older one, and not just because its lead character is older. The very format of the show is old fashioned and it has a judgmental tone that is not youth oriented, despite the fact that Maggie is a lesbian and is frequently presented as having been very sexually adventurous, though we never really see anything. For example, in an article on the [representation of threesomes](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mmf-threesomes-peak-tv_n_5b7714a3e4b05906b4136a60) part of the trend was ascribed to young viewers, as in this quote:

“Our demographic skews young,” “The Magicians,” showrunner Sera Gamble told HuffPost in an email. “If we tried to portray this stuff like it’s edgy and ground-breaking, our audience would just roll their eyes.”

But Younger is the sort of show that does think it's edgy by representing actively sexual characters of varied ages while making reading about sex a guilty pleasure. They're doing this from a framework of speaking to a mostly older audience. What bugs me the most is how unhip Younger is given that the whole premise is about how Liza must adapt to a world geared to millennials when she's a person who doesn't even use social media. People are forever explaining common online terms, such as memes.

At the same time, while money is used as an excuse for why people do all sorts of things that are presented as wrong in the series, Younger itself is a perfect example of a commercial production that doesn't represent anything that's particularly realistic, particularly ambitious, or particularly relevant. It's the visual equivalent of an undemanding read -- which would undoubtedly be dismissed as commercial and embarrassing by the characters, but accepted because the cost of living in NYC is expensive.


End file.
